Reviews

A review of 'Dragon Logic'

The poetry of Stephanie Strickland demonstrates a poetic intelligence that captures not only the lyrical moment in algorithms but also the pervasive quietness of scientific vocabularies. Her work has, thus far, touched on the systems of distributed knowledge — the variegated institutions of knowing, including the natural and virtual geographies into which we embed our cultural memories; the disciplines of mathematics, physics, and astronomy; visual media; and the technologies of language. Dragon Logic is, however, her boldest gesture to date towards the extreme limits of the known universe, one that significantly broadens the limited perception of our ecology to include the virtual interfaces, imagined presences, and online architectures where you cannot “take your own movement for granted” (6).

I am taken in by poetry that denies the reader certain actualities, overt explanations of how imaginations must function in a digital world where our soft analogue bodies appear to recede. The tendency to over-fetishize scientific vocabularies erases the possibilities of the poetic form to explore the momentary warping when such disciplines attempt to explicate the precisions of the abstracted world through natural languages. Dragon Logic, however, resists the over-privileging of abstracted knowledge by interrogating its fantastic predilections for feeling. The book’s structure mirrors an Incan quipu by knotting multifarious knowledge-forms in a way that

Divided, then, into six sections — “e-Dragons,” “Sea Dragons,” “Dragon Maps,” “Alive Inside the Dragons,” “°Codemakers,” and “Afterword” — this collection presents to the reader an imagined cartography that recalls the mythic inscriptions of medieval maps, “here be dragons” (74) — or, more precisely, HC SVNT DRACONES — that denote the limits of our known world and the dangerous, exotic, and uncharted territories that lie outside human knowledge. Such imagined artifacts — and there only two instances of this phrase on extant maps, both of which date from the post-Columbus period[1] — hark back to an era when an understanding of the Earth’s geography was still amorphous. Yet arguably, twenty-first-century spaces remain equally flexible and strange as the perceived threshold between virtual ecologies and the ‘real world’ begins to overlap. Reading Dragon Logic is thus a pleasurable disorientation of what it means not just to know but to read in a confusing social world in which the infinite digital expanse, leaking into material ecosystems, complicates conventional modes of literacy and knowledge.

I have grappled with using a normative mode of reading to respond to a poetry collection that simply resists settled definitions. Yet the only appropriate response is perhaps a personal one. In this case, I offer a speculative ludic reading that treats this book as hypertextual artifact, to open it at any point, at any page, and to read the text without expectation but with an eye for its potentialities, as one does when one logs onto the World Wide Web. Such a non-normative reading underscores the fluid lyricism of Dragon Logic, its openness of form, its circularity, its intrepid and at times concrete visual presentations, and its playful linguistic richness that dissects the inner life of language. Indeed, this collection takes the reader on a hunt for “the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical” dragon (49) along the multifarious pathways that lead to and from a comprehensive “wordhoard treasure” (74) of real and mythic knowledges. What exactly this dragon is, and what form it might take, is perhaps moot. It is the quest for this cryptozoological creature — a journey toward possible expression — that drives the poetic thesis.

Dragon Logic thus performs a poetic voyage of rediscovery of the lacunae between so-called finite knowledges and the terror of mystery to cultivate a grappling of meaning that our twenty-first-century immersion into virtual geographies has sharply foregrounded. Cyberspace in this collection emerges from a dark architecture in which myth and imagination confront and subvert the systems of preconfigured pathways, algorithms, and preexistent sign systems that dovetail into the knowledge systems of exactitude and precision. To this end, this collection interrogates hard quantitative sciences (such as the fields of computing, physics, and mathematics); professional sciences such as architecture; and the indigenous systems of knowledge that include Celtic, Mayan, and Greek mythology, and Māori whakataukī (proverbs). The title Dragon Logic names at once this collusion of digital protocols, scientific inquiry, and technologies of computing with traditional knowledge databases. This concatenation of knowledge systems underscores the struggle for, and translation of, meaning in our contemporary social world. Indeed, the title’s allusion to the speech-to-text software Dragon Dictate or Dragon NaturallySpeaking should not be ignored; the poem as dictation software suggests procedural execution, a knotting of human vocality with the cool utterances of our machines. In these mediations of technological imagination, language becomes filtered through ecosystems of forms, disciplines, fields of knowing, and digital mechanisms. Strickland’s poetic form is transformed into a sensory computer that simultaneously measures and erodes communication. Dragon Logic explores our negligent metaphorical use of words as uncontested markers of knowing. Indeed, the collection raises urgent questions about the authority of our western systems of knowledge, and their legitimating orthodoxies, to rest on a horrifying possibility: how do we really know what we know?

When I open the book randomly, then, I turn surprisingly not to a poem but to an untitled email from Internet artist and poet Alan Sondheim:

Infinitely thin projective slice of difficult equation. The compression comes to grip[s] with it. There may be shadows of the future, I don’t know … coordinates are always variable. When the space moves, the[y] become ill. Don’t they?

Dragon Logic explodes with these moments of appropriated, recycled, polyvocal textuality — what Brian Reed has termed as “redirected language”[2] — that in the information age underlie a system of pointing to prior contexts of meaning. Here, the hypertextual sediments — the URLs that direct the reader along a preconfigured highway to Alan Sondheim’s movie files — lose their original functionality in the materiality of the book. Rendered now passive on the page, they nonetheless continue to speak to their digital operations, their mechanisms that move web users to another ‘page.’ Typing these URLs, however, into the address bar of my browser reveals that these markers are broken links, inoperative like their counterparts on the material page. The “coordinates” of spaces indeed “are always variable.” Strickland demonstrates the inherently instabilities of language as technologies mediate and leave their textual residue on linguistic systems. And it may seem obvious to state that the text, in both print and digital networks, never retains its stable presence. But I am particularly struck by the collaborative and quasi-conversational nature of this collection that points to our social networked conditions. Sondheim’s email underscores the impossible compression of contemporary writing into singular voices and subject positions, and so embraces instead the inevitable variabilities of network culture.

As I open the book again, I come to the poem “Rara Avis.” Underneath the title is a short paratextual note, “telepresence installation by Eduardo Kac°”:

not the old vicarial Holy Communionnor the older surgery pregnancy sexinstead another newer way to enter each other to share the same ( telematic ) co-ordinatesto share via circuitry and hardware ( these vary ) surveillance an ambience physical robots and avatarswander (10)

As the note suggests, the poem refers to an art installation by poet and multimodal artist Eduardo Kac. The installation “Rara Avis” (1996) enabled participants, remotely and locally, to experience an aviary from the perspective of a telerobotic macaw.[3] Telepresence describes emergent technologies that allow a person to participate or mediate a location remotely. Such machines augment not only our soft bodies but also our subjectivities to foreground posthuman and nonhuman points of view. In this opening sequence, Strickland yokes together the regimes of the physical — surgery, pregnancy, and sex — that suggest the ways that we enter multiple materialities and manipulate the thresholds of our epidermal surfaces. Far from losing sight of the material body, and its spiritual aura, in the bodies of information, Strickland recuperates the body’s physical ambience in virtual spaces. Subjectivities multiply, proliferate, and disperse: our “composite unfragmented” selves are “neither // all-here not all-there sliding in // shifts” (10).

The degree symbol (°) is also worth noting here, since it illustrates the multiple sign-systems operating in this collection. This typographical mark represents degrees of arc (in geographic coordinate systems), hours, temperatures, or the diminished quality in musical harmony. In Dragon Logic, the mark is also an indexical signifier that transports the reader to satellite information in the back matter. In this sense, the (°) not only articulates the degrees of presence, boundaries, and borders that call out to the surrounding space — the multiple dimensions of information — but also the “°Codemakers”: the configurational and fictional, the human and the divine characters who have been responsible for knowledge production.

In one final gesture, I turn to the poem “Line spears nets knots have knots.” Several lines especially stand out:

Each successive line points to the ever-changing states of the linguistic ecology with increasing lyrical playfulness. This poem appears to be drawn from an essay by Sally Jane Norman, “Kupenga, Knots, Have Knots,” in which she argues that

In Maori [sic] culture (as in many cultures with strongly articulated transmission protocols), fear of the dissolution of treasured knowledge through its wholesale delivery to the world at large is in some cases leading to quiet death of that knowledge, borne to the grave for want of a sufficiently comprehensive human relay, a vital new carrier.[4]

Strickland’s performative remediation of this language seems suspicious of potential loss and breakdown of communication, and suggests instead that acts of dissolution and the errors of the “vital connections” nonetheless refresh the opportunities for the formation of new word-hoards. The intertwinedness of language, and the natural redundancies of information flows, do not beget loss in errors of transmission, but, rather, offer new linguistic relations, new relays, and recursive exchanges in cultural regeneration.

It is fair to say that Dragon Logic enunciates the pleasure of the loud ambiguities, the moments of almost-knowing, the tip-of-the-tongues, the perhapses, and the abstractions that navigate a concrete horizon of scientific exactitude. Strickland has designed a lyrical 3-D sculpture where “every junction is a number a corner a vertex” (28). Every coordinate is simultaneously a beginning, middle, and ending.

I want more than a box with door on it, or a minimized surface; although so many would be glad for it, content to lose

In a post-riot-grrrl world, it’s hard for those of us who were too young for the theoretical debates of the eighties to understand the amount of collective cognitive labor that was required to move us from feminism’s second wave to its third. We easily take for granted the radical cultural shifts that had to take place for Kathleen Hanna’s emergence on stage with the word ‘slut’ written on her belly to be seen as a populist punk feminist act, until we are kindly reminded otherwise. I was politely offered this “otherwise” recently by a sentence in Louise Dupré’s essay “Four Sketches for a Morphology,” in Belladonna’s recently published translation of Theory, A Sunday, originally published in French in 1988 by Éditions du remue-ménage in Montréal. When I read Dupré’s claim that “Feminism can only survive by recognizing the feminine as difference” (95), my initial reaction was, “well, yeah.” Luckily, I was alone when I thus betrayed my origins as an ungrateful and privileged adolescent of the deconstructionist nineties whose college green seemed to be nothing if not a carnivalesque sea of celebrated differences, because as I continued my read of the essays and literary work in Theory, A Sunday, it became clear that the kind of political struggle and intellectual labor in these texts made possible the relatively utopic feminist intellectual world in which I emerged as a young queer writer.

It makes sense then, that Belladonna published Theory, A Sunday as the inaugural piece in its new “Germinal Texts” series, for the text documents the kind of feminist thinking enabled by French poststructuralism. More importantly, it shows how this inquiry aided a particular group of French Canadian women writers in feminist interrogations of literary culture and of language itself. The publication also serves as an homage to the rich dialogues that have been taking place between American and Canadian women writers for several generations. In the afterword, Belladonna founder Rachel Levitsky stresses the importance of the “Canadian feminist avant-garde” for offering her a model for expanding the politics of an experimental American literary scene that, in the aftermath of Language poetry, believed “language dissonance and disruption was political in and of itself” (152–53).

As a literary project, Theory, A Sunday presents critical and creative productions that emerged from a women writers’ study group started by Nicole Brossard in the early eighties and included Louise Cotnoir, Gail Scott, Louise Dupré, France Théoret, and Louky Bersianik, whose work make up the volume. In its multiyear effort of Sunday meetings (hence the book’s title), this group worked at defining feminist consciousness through the poststructuralist theory emerging from France. Poststructuralism’s emphasis upon the slippery nature of the sign, its ability to question philosophical binaries through its interrogation of linguistic representation, provided these writers a means by which to move beyond the essentialisms of second-wave feminism and to ponder how one might exhibit a feminist consciousness on the page. Fans of Gail Scott will be excited to read her essay “A Feminist at the Carnival” and a short work of fiction, “‘The Kiss’ of Edvard Munch, Revisited.” Scott’s meditative essay on being a female writer, a work richly layered with novelistic elements, highlights how well the narrative techniques of her novels have always served philosophical thought. Though at times the reader will feel the great gap of time between ‘now and then’ when encountering, for instance, Dupré’s mention of “the teen idol of the moment,” Madonna, this distance disappears with her interrogation, “Where is the feminism in all of this?” a question I lately feel compelled to ask each time I open up my Internet browser (91). Miley Cyrus on a flying hot dog, I believe, does not a Kathleen Hanna make, though argue with me, if you wish. It’s a slippery space. Similarly, Louky Bersianik’s piece “Aristotle’s Lantern,” with its deconstruction of the academic critical apparatus and its detrimental effects on the reception of women’s writing, interrogates and dismantles canonized patriarchal forms and reminds us, in light of our dismal twenty-first-century VIDA numbers, that, “Baby, we haven’t come (too) far.”

Nicole Brossard’s opening essay in the collection offers a strong example of what poststructuralism made possible for the Montreal group and an introduction to the kind of theoretical work one will discover in this volume. Early in her essay Brossard announces that Western feminism “presents us with a wholly new historical phenomenon, because it questions the imaginary, symbolic, and psychological construct of everything through which the inferiorization of women has been programmed” (19). Though her vocabulary teases the reader into expecting a Lacanian analysis, another Frenchman aids Brossard in the heavy lifting of articulating the relationship between a psychological patriarchy and the linguistic phenomena it produces. It’s Brossard’s turn to Barthes that I found to be the most compelling moment of the essay. Brossard understands “misogynist antagonism,” i.e. patriarchal ideology, in narrative terms, specifically as a narrative we inhabit (25). For this reason it is subject to the same contradictions and disruptions inherent to all narratives. She is able to make this important move, one that will allow her to shift from a discussion of a general feminist project to the specific role of the writer in this larger political movement, by invoking Barthes, for whom the form of narrative “is essentially marked by two powers: that of extending its signs through the whole of the story, and that of inserting unforeseeable developments within these distortions” (25–26). That is, according to Barthes, narrative suffers from something like an excess of itself. In its self-perpetuation, narrative produces a proliferation of signs that may or may not serve the same end. It’s these “unforeseeable developments” that allow for feminist consciousness to emerge. Though all women find themselves struggling within the master narrative of patriarchy, Brossard outlines how this proliferation of patriarchy’s signs provides an opportunity for self-consciousness.

Up until this moment Brossard had discussed patriarchy and its narrative as an extra-literary phenomenon, the sociopsychological story we are all asked to buy into. But Brossard’s turn to Barthes opens up the possibility for literary narrative to disrupt this sociopsychological phenomenon. Through the act of writing, a woman creates the necessary distance — the space between signifier and signified — to gain a critical perspective upon her own story, which is also the story of patriarchal order: “In fact, if it weren’t for what this subjective (diaries, biographies, letters) and novelistic narration of our lives exposes to our consciousness, we should have no other alternative, for lack of any other perspective, than to debate amongst ourselves using the contradictory and hierarchical binaries that the male imaginary constructs” (26). Patriarchal narrative, through its proliferation into a woman’s written self-narration, exposes her to its form as a sociopsychological narrative. The externalization of this “master” narrative through the act of writing creates the necessary self-consciousness to begin a feminist interrogation. For Brossard this gap between signifier and signified is where feminist consciousness begins.

Such theoretical headiness, Gail Scott reminds us in her remarks in the afterword, emerged not from isolated intellectual practices, but from fruitful Sunday gatherings, suggesting that the community produced through this collective study became at least in a partial way an answer to what a new feminism and a new feminist consciousness might look like:

Arriving at noon at someone’s house, each brought a page in French on a topic … The texts were the product of our most recent discoveries in writing, in reading, or had been scored in the heat of political intervention … During the discussion of our texts, we drank coffee, then out came the wine and the food, so the discussions evolved into a kind of camaraderie of sharing and reflection. I remember the meetings that lasted from noon till almost midnight, full of passion and instruction. (151)

In her affectionate introduction to the book, Lisa Robertson emphasizes that these efforts, which took place in the city outside of the auspices of any academic institution, forever altered the landscape of Montreal. She writes, “Thinking about and reading the work of these Montreal women now, twenty-five years later, I am brought to the realization that feminism is one of the scintillating companions of the culture of cities. Feminist culture, discourse, and resistance has shaped contemporary urban experience and urban space” (11). Robertson’s understanding of feminist intellectual activity as a means of altering urban space once again underlines the fact that the publication of these texts continues a dialogue between generations of avant-garde women writers in North America. Where the social and intellectual practices of the Montreal group altered the landscape of that city twenty-five years ago, Belladonna as a reading series and publishing group has been helping change the landscape of New York literary life since the late nineties. As Levitsky notes in her commentary in the afterword, she was only able to conceive of such an intervention through the legacy of these women. Their collaborative literary practices, social and intellectual, “offered [her] permission” (153). Belladonna’s publication of the results testifies that Sunday meetings have been happening ever since and will continue happening in cities all around us.

On Uche Nduka

How many poetries are there; how many could there be? The poetry of investigation, the poetry of protest, personal poetry, national poetry, international poetry, documentary poetry, poetry of war and peace, emotional, environmental, philosophical, identity poetry. And what’s at the root of all these poetries, if anything? Poetry as a way of approaching the world — as the urgent effort — probably futile — to get at something inside or outside through language — or to escape into language as a way to survive a brutal material or psychological world. Somehow language — the effort in the ineffability of words — can save us if we can engage at a deep enough level to get past the pain. That’s then a poem and more than a poem. It’s a mode of living. What we call a poem might not be more than a momentary snapshot of an ongoing life in language — a dislocation, an exile.

Some thoughts on reading Ijele, a powerful prose text by the Nigerian poet Uche Nduka. Born in 1963 into a family of Christian priests, Nduka was brought up bilingual in English and Igbo and earned a BA in English from the University of Nigeria in 1985. When he was four years old the Biafran War (the Nigerian civil war) broke out. Possibly as many as three million people died in that conflict, many of them children — Nduka’s generational peers — mostly from starvation. Chaos and ethnic violence in Nigeria preceded that war and continue to the present. Top Nigerian government officials regularly and spectacularly fleece the nation’s coffers. The bloody terrorist activities of Boko-Haran, whose members recently broke into a boarding school and slashed the throats of students asleep in bed, go on without restraint.

Nduka left Nigeria in 1994 for Germany, when he won an arts fellowship from the Goethe Institute. He’s lived out of the country ever since, in Germany and Holland for twelve years, and in 2007 emigrated to the US, where his parents and family live.

Given this background, it’s clear that for Nduka, poetry has had to be much more than a polite profession or an aesthetic preoccupation. He has of necessity had to find in poetry a means of survival and a method for fighting back. No way to set aside the scars, the disappointment, and the social rage, and go on to write a poetry of reflective personal feeling. Also, it would seem, no way straightforwardly to attempt to describe or depict the immensity of what has been experienced and felt — writing would have to take you beyond that to a more total or global sense of engagement with language as defiance, as hope, hope not for a probably impossible political solution to the chaos, but hope for a present, in writing, in which sanity and endurance prevail, even as the pain is confronted head-on. At any rate, this seems to be what Nduka’s writing does. Poetry as path or weapon — as life.

i had barely been born when i nearly lost my life. that music is not higher than the unity of pines. how intact am i. how intact am i. how intact are you. i should turn my back on them:these opened wounds may swallow me. we make claims for the land hoping it will not betray us.quandrants of parenthesis.overnight, waterlilies rose and sent mails to him.waterlilies speaking for the lodgers. not a few are anatomically incorrect. (“Overnight,” 25; unconventional spacing in original)

A prize-winning poet well connected in Nigerian and African literary communities, Nduka writes in the Western avant-garde tradition, but without particular affinities that I can see, judging at least from the work in Ijele. What’s inspiring about the book is its line by line intensity, and the way it simply states, baldly and without pathos — almost, at times, coldly, without regret or protest — its themes of sexuality, dismay, exile, resistance, dislocation, without any promise or redemption other than in the text itself. The book consists of eighty one-page prose poems (a few are longer) written in mostly disjunct sentences without capitalization. The compositional method seems to be improvisational, listening on a word-by-word basis for what seems to want to come next, and allowing that to happen, celebrating surprise, spontaneity, contradiction, reaching out for something not yet realized. Onward, always onward. Yet the poems do not wander or drift — there’s a driving rhythm and insistence to them, an urgency, a sense of defiance. I found the text frankly difficult to read for its density and intensity — I kept wanting to read on, but sometimes found that difficult to do; I needed breaks. So it took a while to get through. Ijele seems intent on doing its work, reader or no. Nduka is a fiercely independent writer.

So far I just like doing my own thing and not buying into the hype of either formal or informal English; traditional or avant-garde usages. I enact a language style that suits my mood and the subjects I am interested in. Linguistically it seems there are a lot of trenches that have not been explored in poems/poetry. I keep attempting to investigate them. I don’t want to feel like people expect me to write in English timidly. I have always been wary about the conformist pressure of Nigerian, African, European, and American literary scenes. Yet I guess I am not fully in possession of the knowledge of the things/factors/situations that motivate the shifts in the usage of English in my work. I try not to overthink this phenomena. Pushing the boundaries is what a real poet does. I am writing about the United States of America now, but with my eyes wide open. (Nduka to Johannes in Montevidayo, September 24, 2103)

Wanting some information on the word, I ran Ijele through Google translator. In Zulu it means “prison” or “warder.” In Igbo it’s the title for a traditional masquerade about a courier between the spiritual and physical worlds — in the case of Nduka’s poems, between Nigeria and Europe/America or between the social horror and triviality of the world and the possibilities for survival with integrity that a life of poetry provides.

words invite us to take part in stamping their feet; in thrashing the desks of belles-lettres;in scorning the mirage of a bookworm; in fusing bindweed and algae. my logic cannot catch all the spoils of the possible. my past momentarily cannot cease being a thirst. being no visitation of a whip, being no visitation of loss, the subterfuge of a needler is patently absurd. this present incarnation of the philosopher’s stone does not interest me. some courtesies are diabolical. overall the fowl has bled to its limit. interruption is our condition. in interruption is our trace. the way in is not the way out. going in the direction of thirdness it is better to be incensed than bored. (“Branching,” 72)

As a writer concerned with poetry as more than poetry — poetry as a life in language that can realistically confront the world as it is without going mad or resorting to the various impressive strategies for distraction that our present world has on offer — I am drawn to Nduka’s work. Because of what he has seen, what has formed him, there’s a level of passion in his work beyond what’s normal in much other writing today.

Let’s begin with the title A Mammal of Style, which of course echoes the Chicago Manual of Style, someone’s notion of the proper and correct way of rendering sensible sentences in the English language. A manual isn’t a book you read, it’s a book you have close at hand — the word means hand, functional and straightforward. This book feels like that.

But a mammal isn’t a manual; it’s an animal. It could be a human animal, but as animals humans have no proper way of doing anything. They do what comes naturally. They live in the world, reacting to it. Grunting and grimacing, as the occasion demands. A mammal of style describes what this book is: grunts and grimaces of literary style, gestures, blunt-force interventions. Distinctly not sensible.

Its collaborative authors, Ted Greenwald and Kit Robinson, have been well known as practitioners of the art of innovative poetry for many decades, both of them, to my ear, having consistently written a poetry that is edgy, flat, and tough, without much ornament, very much in the American idiom, with lots of local slang, technical terms, and contemporary buzz-words, sending up all these vocabularies and simply doing them ina dead-pan, satirical tone — the opposite of passionate or emotional. In fact, decoration, elegance, subtlety, beauty, are not words one would normally use to describe Ted’s or Kit’s writing, as far as I know it. So they are natural colleagues and collaborators. Together they have produced in A Mammal of Style a wonderful source text for anyone who wants to hear a peculiarly trenchant American take on contemporary life and letters. “Kit” and “Ted”: plain three-letter American guy names.

Mammal is a substantial text, more than 130 pages and divided into six distinct sections, each devoted to a different poetic form: sonnet, sestina, haibun, maybe haiku, a three-stanza fifteen line form that might be a version of the medieval French rondeau, and a final one-poem section that seems to be written free form. There are fourteen sonnets, ten fifteen-line poems (the last being ten lines long, not fifteen), twelve sestinas, and twenty-four haibun. It seems that Ted and Kit had a plan. What’s interesting about the plan is that it violates utterly the implied tone or feeling that goes with these traditional forms. A sonnet — even an unconventional sonnet — sounds and feels a particular way, as does a sestina, a haibun, and so on. These poems don’t sound that way at all; in fact, what’s remarkable about them is how they manage, regardless of form, to sound pretty much the same: full of attitude about the contemporary scene, mostly with regard to the language we use every day to confuse ourselves about what’s going on. This is word by word, phrase by phrase poetry, made often without any noticeable sense of intentional connection from part to part, so that a moment by moment reading of the text, without worrying about where the text is going or where it has come from, is a necessity — and will reward the reader.

What haunts me about this work is its most typical rhythmic structure — many stressed syllables one after the other, almost telegraphic. Here, for instance, are some of the titles of the sonnets: “Trickle Comp,” “Lift Hood,” “Lath Talk,” “Mound Co,” “Poles Claw,” “Light Atch,” “Down Own”; many of the lines within the poems (this is true not only in the sonnets, but throughout) echo this very tough and definite stressed phrasing, which for me expresses a radically unsentimental take on the world as it swirls by. A tough, cold eye. As in the sestina “Fire House and Crowded Theater”:

When all is said virtually Voice drops do whisper Well-wishers with access To home range audience One bare witness So difficult to believe

Fantasy is ability to believe …

Later verses of this sestina come, by way of the logic of the end rhymes, to lines like:

Got wheelchair accessCracked up to believe

… illustrating probably the main technique and message of the work — the wisdom of fractured cliche.

As someone conversant with Buddhist literature I was amused by examples of fractured clichés from that tradition, as these lines that play off the Buddhist formula for confession (“all my ancient twisted karma, from beginningless greed, hate and delusion, I now fully avow”):

all my ancient twisted car parts born of green hail anddiffusion I do now secretarially avow.

… and the several lovely fractured quotations from Dogen.

Political commentary appears frequently, built on pop culture references, with easy humor and without the usual angst or bitterness:

as well as plenty of commentary on poetry and its uses, as in this fantasy about the power of the poet to defeat the world with his verse:

Passing through fields of garbage the syntacticalhero pulls the trigger on meant verbiage shoots the objectof his rampant longitude, dead predicate, and rides off intothe archaic, trailing diaphanous interpellations. How theWest Was.

or this marvelous line that more or less captures what poetry used to do and what it does now:

Scratch at vague word moss, places poetry used to go.

Also, the world’s greatest haiku:

Great sweaterReally love the shoesAnd the watch!

In short, this is a delightful book, full of the sorts of recognitions that one wants from poetry, but without the annoyances that that sort of experience could produce in less capable hands than those of Ted and Kit.

I haven’t said much here about the mechanics of the collaboration between these two great poets — how did they do this, what was their method of working long distance (Kit in Berkeley, Ted in New York), what were they thinking, what intentions did they have? When I asked them they preferred not to say, seemingly themselves not focused on methodology or documentation of how a poem is made so much as on the accidental and forgotten stumblings and miracles that make poems appear out of our biographical and cultural miasmas. Neither Ted nor Kit works in a university, and neither seems interested (as do the very many poets who teach and profess poetry) in rationalizing and documenting the making of poetry, focusing on questions of methodology and text, context, on the theory that no text stands alone, it comes out of a cultural and historical moment, it comes out of influences, other texts, biographical realities, and so on. True! We must not become too mystical and precious about our poetries! On the other hand, to make poetry into another reasonable cultural production that can be folded into the cultural/commercial mania that rules our world these days is certainly not such a great idea either. Leave it to poets like our Ted and Kit to manage to remain outside all that, to find a way, together to clear some space for thought.

(Note: Takeaway, published by c_L Press in Portland, Oregon, 2013, is a brief companion volume to A Mammal. It’s a forty-four-page text in a small-format, sewn-bound book consisting of poems with a triplet/couplet form. The tone and subject matter is a continuation of what’s found in Mammal).

I was unfamiliar with the poetry of Burt Kimmelman when Jacket2 asked me to take up the assignment of writing about Gradually the World: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2013. Reading, rereading, pondering the volume — which is a life — has been an education for me in poetry’s use as engagement with writing as a means of being in the world. Why, after all, is anyone writing? Of necessity, I suppose, to figure out how to survive in — even appreciate — being alive temporarily in a world. Kimmelman’s poems surely serve that function for him and his readers. Here is a seriously committed poet who has felt through, thought through, and written into what and how a poem is — for a poem and for a life. In his important interview with Thomas Fink in Jacket in late 2010, Kimmelman cites John Taggart’s assessment of his work: that his poems “evince a quality infrequently encountered in contemporary American poetry: modesty, an attentive and forthright modesty. As such they are unassailable. They cannot be tarnished by our times’ endemic disease, the irony disease.”[1] That’s exactly right: Kimmelman’s poems are intelligent, admirably well wrought, almost classically so. They reflect straightforwardly usually tiny moments of lived experience, but never without care and pressure for the writing moment, a moment of working in and through words — yet they are, as Taggart points out, modest in their claims and tone. It’s as if each poem were shaking hands warmly with life, each careful word making no claims whatever for any larger meaning or understanding, and reaching out to hold hands with the reader too, in the embrace of the words of the poems.

Although Kimmelman is impressively well read and astute about poems, poetry, culture, and art in general, his modesty seems genuine and deeply felt. He wants to be generous, true to the tradition in which he writes, truthful in his own productions, without posturing or imposing anything. Sounds simple enough, and is — on first reading — unspectacular enough. But ongoing reading (slowly, a difficult mode of reading these days) brings out this quality of modesty more strongly — and more and more impressively as one goes on. Because it turns out it isn’t easy simply to be a person in a world, and to write simply, quietly, and elegantly out of that. Kimmelman manages to do it.

However, Taggart’s comment about modesty and irony has another dimension. A serious and intense engagement with poetry now, it seems to me, may well confront the question of irony not necessarily as an attitude, a coolness, let’s say, or an avoidance mechanism — which irony generally is — but rather as a genuine sense of linguistic doubt. That is, what does a word say, where does it come from, what is — a word having been written — its implication? A lot of the difficulty of contemporary poetry stems from this felt sense of any word’s having been captured, maybe defeated, by the world’s various social pressures — if not from outside then from inside — as one’s constructed self. Irony that comes from this pressure may not be the opposite of sincerity or engagement: it may be a more contemporary form of sincerity. Kimmelman’s sense of language doesn’t directly reference this, though he must be aware of it. See “Poem for Jackson Mac Low” (162), which is a straightforward personal narrative about walking to attend Mac Low’s memorial. No one could have been more sincere in his work than Jackson, yet is his self-consciously un-self-centered writing ironic or unironic in its word-by-word distancing techniques?

There’s something particularly interesting about a “new and selected” that you don’t find in the original volumes. Every selection of poems is a new articulation of the work, much more than a mere repackaging. So, for instance, a poem that opens a volume or closes it has a particular meaning and flavor coming from that strategic placement. Any poet thinks about such placement; Kimmelman probably more than most, being so clearly thoughtful and careful in his writing. But this factor is completely altered in a new and selected, where the poems are ordered in more or less chronological batches, often missing poems between that might have had their functions in off-setting poems to their left and right, so to speak. So that the poems will inevitably read less for their aesthetic juxtapositions than for their sense of being a recording of a life. In such a selection you notice (particularly in Kimmelman’s work, where there is clear and coherent subject matter) the occupations, preoccupations, shapes of a life over time. Kimmelman writes about art and artworks; he writes about his family, his daughter Jane from birth to adolescence, his aging mother, his deceased brother, his wife; he writes about seeing, hearing, being in places as sun rises and sets, flowers bloom and fall. It appears from this volume — for this reader at least — that Kimmelman’s verse is getting clearer, simpler, more distilled, as it goes along the continuum of time.

The book opens with “New Poems 2011–2013.” These are mostly small, precise, understated works whose modesty can’t hide their shimmer:

This poem seems easy enough, but note the perfect five-syllable lines, the rhyme, the heft of “stone,” “home,” “dirt.” There’s a lot here that doesn’t need or want any further explanation.

Not so for the earlier work. After the initial suite of newest poems, we go back in time to the earliest work, “Poems 1982–1992,” which has many ekphrastic poems, reflections on visual artworks (Kimmelman, from New York, can easily spend time at major galleries and museum shows). I find this work far less engaging and more ponderous — difficult for me, since (as is the case with most of these poems) I don’t know the works being written about. This section ends with the birth of the poet’s daughter in several careful, sweet poems that skirt the edge of sentimentality, more or less successfully I think. (The urge to write conventional epiphanic poems without sliding into sentimentality is a problem — and a gift — Kimmelman is quite aware of, as expressed in the Jacket interview). Still, though: a tightrope act, sometimes more dangerous than one would want. (Although, on second thought, why not be sentimental? If you are sentimental knowingly, is this still sentimental? Or is it ironic?)

Among many others, Kimmelman reads Corman, Bronk, Oppen, and Heidegger — salient sources for his poems. In his piece on Oppen and Heidegger, he writes, “Oppen and Heidegger depend on tautological thinking, literally the contemplation of what is self-evident, and so for Oppen the things within the realized world become supremely relevant.”[2] In Oppen’s work — as in Kimmelman’s — there is a terseness and a careful, respectful, almost courteous stance in relation to the world and the word that, for the poet, makes the world and one’s ability to stand in it. I find this notion of “tautological thinking” new and essential in understanding both Heidegger and Oppen, and Kimmelman. Things just are. There they are. They actually appear, shining. One stands in relation to them. There’s no interpretation, no commentary, no theorizing necessary — or, in fact, possible. Yet language, which is thought, can’t help confronting the fact and in such confrontation deeply entering it, appreciating it. This Zen-like approach to poetry or life (a kind of amazement that there is anything here at all) is what Heidegger, in his rather tortured but transcending way of expression, gropes toward, and what Oppen at his best reflects in the clarity of his words. As does Kimmelman.